Page 85 of Soulless Saint

Soft leather brushed against my cheek with each step, and I tried to reach for it, wanting to feel it under my fingers. It smelled so good. He smelled so good. Like warm amber and musk and wood and Hardin.

“Yeah,” I heard Kaleb reply, and the sound of something jingling had me trying to peel my eyelids back only to see a blurry, streaky mess of dark colors that appeared discombobulated. Like one of those paintings where everything was backward and upside down, purposefully distorted.

I caught black eyes, hooded and shadowed. A bright sliver of moon and the close darkness of the inside of a vehicle.

Something bumped my feet, and I jolted, jostled from the other end as I was pulled onto a lap, rough fingers pushing my hair out of my face.

“She okay?” Kaleb asked.

Hardin didn’t reply, not audibly, but I could picture him nodding to Kaleb in the rearview, the imagined image pockmarked with blooming lights, coming into and out of focus.

Something pulled the hem of my dress, covering me, and I sucked in a breath as something grazed my ass. The lightest touch sent a ripple of fire coursing up my body. Like pain, but also, not.

Why did it hurt?

A vivid image of a hand clapping down on my skin, punishing me, stole through my mind, and I shuddered at the drug-tainted memory, my thighs pressing together.

It came back in waves, my body bowing and clenching as I relived every rough touch, every fevered kiss, all of it tinted with an air of delusion. Making me question whether it happened at all.

“Mmm,” I moaned against Hardin’s lap, the space between my legs aching but on fire again anyway. I twisted my hand sloppily in my dress, trying to put the fire out, my hand finding wet, sensitive skin. The light touch of my own fingers sent a jolt through me, and I moaned, grinding against the slippery touch of my fingers.

A hand grabbed my wrist roughly, prying my fingers away, making me whimper.

“Don’t,” a savage growl echoed somewhere above me and I tried to find him in the broken dark as the car moved beneath us. I found a jaw that seemed set in stone. Eyes that flashed with physical pain as light passed over the face of a fallen angel, illuminating him only for an instant before he was plunged back to darkness.

I blinked, a moment of clarity taking me as I remembered taking a pill from Toby. Realized that I was high. And in the backseat of Kaleb and Hardin’s Bronco. How the hell did I get here?

Why did I take that pill?

Oh yeah… because I didn’t want to think about the fact that I…

Kaleb was sort of beautiful from this angle.

I mean, he was always beautiful, but with both hands on the wheel as he propelled us god knew where, I could see the cut of his jaw, the perfect angle of his nose. The way his lips were evenly sized. The strong protrusion of his cheekbone.

I blinked, and he was a statue, carved of marble. Blinked again and he was marble made flesh.

“Whoa,” I said on a breath, reaching out a hand as if I could touch him, but he was just out of reach and there was still something holding me back, shackling my arm to the seat.

I tugged it free and sighed heavily into rough denim, letting my heavy arm drop.

“Vixen, you with us?” Kaleb asked, and I got the feeling we were moving very, very fast even though I couldn’t see out the windows. It felt like I was flying, and I let out a little giggle.

“Yeah,” I replied, my voice sounding sluggish to my own ears.

“See if you can get some more water into her,” Kaleb said, and I gulped as the lip of a bottle was pushed to my lips, the cool liquid slithering down both my throat and the side of my face, feeling like silk.

A thumb brushed over my lips when I was finished, and I pulled it into my mouth with a short moan, sucking greedily, feeling something hard push against the back of my neck.

“Becca,” that perfect voice groaned, more of a plea now as he jerked his hand free of my mouth and I licked my lips, tasting salt.

He brushed his hand up and down my back, and I felt my eyelids drooping as a sense of ease slipped over me like a warm blanket.

I couldn’t be sure how long I was out, but I knew from the ache in my neck that it must’ve been a while when I jerked awake at the sound of a ringing phone blasting through loud speakers.

My exhausted mind struggled to catch up to the present, feeling movement beneath me. Trying to stretch out my legs and finding I couldn’t, the cramped space not affording me the option of luxury.

“Where the fuck are you?” An unfamiliar voice spoke through the speakers, making my head throb. I tried to cover my ears, wanting nothing more than to close my eyes and go back to sleep, even though colorful starbursts kept exploding like fireworks over the backs of my eyelids.

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